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I'm writing with a baby on my lap-- a baby who crawls now, in full hands and knees baby crawl style. He also cruises, but we don't have any couches, so there isn't much for him to cruise around on. He does it on the headboard of my bed, which always leads to me clutching his ankle to make sure he doesn't get too close to the edge, and him tugging his leg away from my hand in frustration. "Let go me!" he would say, if he could.

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The hammering noises behind my house are coming from my kids, who are building a club house in the old bamboo chicken coop. I'm happy about this, it has brought about some great moments of teamwork from the four kids. There is a lot of running back and forth, making of signs, sweeping of dust, and hammering of random pieces of bamboo that were left over from the creation of the chicken coop.

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I'm supposed to be having a writing day today, but this afternoon Chinua had to retreat into a dark room to huddle out a migraine. Poor guy. It makes me worried-- this is the second one in two weeks and I don't want them to come back. He's been doing well, migraine free, for so long now, ever since he figured out magnesium deficiency was the cause. He thinks drinking coffee has triggered them, so hopefully if he cuts caffeine out of his diet again, they'll go away.

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The days of mental anguish over the book name have come to a surprising finish. Thank you so much for your help! My whole family will be so glad that I've finally decided on a name, since I've been walking in and out of rooms muttering random words to myself, or saying, "What about...?" over and over and OVER again.

A Home as Wide as the Earth got the most votes, and I came to believe that it was the best fit-- it describes a lot about me and about traveling. But then yesterday I started working on the third book in the series and found this post, which represents the title so perfectly and represents a lot of what that next season of our lives was like. In that next two years, we lived in California, back in Goa, in Nepal, and in Thailand, and those were the years when home became almost an obsession for me. So I think we've found a title! For the third book, that is.

Er.

So now we had a title for the first and the third books and they followed a sort of pattern and it fits that the middle title would follow the pattern, at least in a sort of vague-ish way, which cut out a lot of the other titles I had been considering. I had this idea about lights in dark water, from this post about Chinua and I swimming among phosphorescent algae. And I came up with the title Oceans Bright With Stars, and immediately knew it was the one, and the great thing is that we have two, both of these books have titles now, which is good, because I'm trying to have them both out by the end of the year.

I think they work well in a series-

Trees Tall as Mountains

Oceans Bright With Stars

A Home as Wide as the Earth

-they say what I want them to say, they all tie in with specific themes or posts, and they are alike enough to go together, but dissimilar enough that it doesn't get cheesy. Thanks so much you beautiful people, we done good.